Despite the upsurge in interest in World War I, the Ottoman battle- and home-front experiences of the war have remained largely unknown, even though they fully replicated and in many respects exceeded the experiences of other belligerent nations. As in other belligerent countries, people living throughout the Ottoman Empire heavily suffered from mass conscription, deportation, massacres, rationing, government requisitioning of grain and livestock, and other catastrophic effects of the war. At the end of the war, Ottoman society was deeply traumatized due to the high number of casualties, devastated economic infrastructure, involuntary displacement, cultural anxiety, ethnic tensions, and political instability. First World War created new economic and social realities in the Ottoman Empire. During the war, governmental and military policies extended state’s capacity of intervention into the distant corners of the empire to extract people and resources to a degree not seen before. In this paper, I would like to focus on the state’s new functions and the political nature and implications of these new wartime realities and their perception by ordinary people at the Ottoman home front. The documents in the Ottoman archives provide a unique perspective on ordinary people’s interaction with the wartime state. While asking for government’s help, these people in part justified their demands on the traditional claim of material need, but they also understood payments and provisions as something the state owed them because of their husbands’, sons’ and fathers’ service and sacrifice. They made incessant demands on state officials to supply basic foodstuffs for them to feed their families. This heightened contact with the state during wartime is a good example of how the concept of Ottoman citizenship took shape through the everyday experiences of ordinary people and their relations with official authorities. In this paper, I will examine this complex and dynamic wartime relationship between state, nation, and citizens based on the official documents, reports, memories, and also ordinary peoples’ letters, petitions, and complaints. Studying the wartime interaction between state and society and focusing on daily material concerns of the Ottoman people, I believe, would provide a new perspective on the disintegration process of the empire.